A Goan Childhood

Fragments of memory of a time long gone, from a life lived far away. By Selma Carvalho

- Selma Carvalho

Colonial Nairobi, where Conceição Gomes and other South Asian clerks found employment C. early 1900s

IF I REMEMBER MY CHILDHOOD, I remember the sky which I think, for the most part, was cloudless and uncreased. That perhaps is a metaphor because certainly I don’t remember my childhood being eventful; not in the way childhoods full of adventure or adversity are eventful. If I remember the sky, then I recall the leaves, thick and leathery, all around me, green in their fecundity, flitting from branches burdened with fruit. The smell of that fruit, when harvested, filled the house with a deep joy, spreading imperceptibly, light as a forefinger tapping me on the shoulder and guiding me to the half-light of the dispense (pantry). Here, stores of mango, banana, pineapple, papaya and chickoo ripened, cradled in whiskers of hay and covered with turned-over wicker baskets.

If I remember the days, then I remember the nights; showers of stars raining on treetops puncturing the darkling sky. Jackals cried in distant hills; their whining carried by the wind into our home. I lay buried chest-high in a blanket, burrowing into the goodness of my grandmother’s warmth. Her skin stored the stories of my childhood. I was an experiment left in my grandmother’s care to bloom. Only, I didn’t. I almost died.

A curious cartography of squat houses guides grandmother. She knows most of the people who inhabit these homes, and occasionally she pauses to wish them well. Along the way, boundary lines and latched gateways claim ownership of land, the houses fronted by gardens where red hibiscus and white perpeta flower abundantly